Henry David Thoreau

When I hear the hypercritical quarreling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc., stretching or contracting every speaker to certain rules of theirs. I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute or an interjection: first of all, mother tongue; and last of all, artificial or father tongue. Essentially your truest poetic sentence is as free and lawless as a lamb’s bleat.

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.

Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

I say beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

Politics is the gizzard of society, full of gut and gravel.

Personally, I’m always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.

We are made happy when reason can discover no occasion for it. The memory of some past moments is more persuasive than the experience of present ones. There have been visions of such breadth and brightness that these motes were invisible in their light.

Some are so very studious of learning what was done by the ancients that they know not how to live with the moderns.

Method goes far to prevent trouble in business: for it makes the task easy, hinders confusion, saves abundance of time, and instructs those that have business depending, both what to do and what to hope.

To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.

The habit of looking on the best side of every event is worth more than a thousand pounds a years.

It is very natural for young men to be vehement, acrimonious and severe. For as they seldom comprehend at once all the consequences of a position, or perceive the difficulties by which cooler and more experienced reasoners are restrained from confidence, they form their conclusions with great precipitance. Seeing nothing that can darken or embarrass the question, they expect to find their own opinion universally prevalent, and are inclined to impute uncertainty and hesitation to want of honesty, rather than of knowledge.

Breed is stronger than pasture.

When the eagles are silent the parrots begin to jabber.

Real practice has no purpose or direction, so it can include everything that comes.

Hitch your wagon to a star. Let us not fag in paltry works which serve our pot and bag alone.

Creativity is a consequence of action, not its motivation. Do what needs to be done and then ask whether it was possible.

Grow old along with me; the best is yet to be.

Sow a thought and you reap an action; sow an act and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character and you reap a destiny.

No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no past at my back.